Marketing Practice

Content marketing evolves to be a powerful marketing tactic in the digital, fast moving, information driven world. It is not a new strategy but more and more enterprises begin to engage in content marketing gradually. So what are the reasons of the rise of content marketing in today’s society? This paper discusses about the use of content marketing in businesses and how it brings benefits to the companies. The conclusion summarizes six strategies companies use during the implementation of content marketing in their businesses.

" In a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, Araujo et al. (2008) call on the marketing discipline to embrace the insights of the social study of markets in economic sociology as a promising avenue for revitalising the classical concepts of marketing. Drawing on the research programme launched by Michel Callon’s 1998 volume, The Laws of the Markets, they suggest that one traditional disciplinary distinction be abandoned in particular: “Although convenient, a distinction between market-making practices – defined as activities that shape the overall market structure – and marketing practices – defined as firm-based activities aimed at developing an actor’s position within a structure – is misleading” (Araujo et al., 2008: 8).

    In this paper, we take up Araujo et al.’s (2008) call to deploy such a constructivist economic sociology perspective in the study of an empirical case. The case study concerns the emergence of the so-called romkert (meaning ‘ruin garden’) or romkocsma (‘ruin pub’) phenomenon in Budapest between 1999 and 2008 (see Lugosi and Lugosi, 2008). A ruin or rom bar, terms we use interchangeably in this paper, is a hospitality venue that incorporates its ruinous surroundings (such as dilapidated courtyards and other distressed material goods) as part of its service concept and the consumer experience. We re-describe this case using the actor-network theory (ANT) perspective of Callon and colleagues."

The Routledge Companion to Critical Marketing Studies is a co-edited collection by myself, Matthew Higgins, Janice Denegri-Knott and Rohit Varman.

We hope that this will make ideal supplementary reading for courses across many different levels of marketing education. Each chapter is accessible, cutting-edge and stimulating.

For lecturers, it would be the perfect vehicle for you to consult before a new semester to update your knowledge about recent debates in our subject. This would enable you to direct students to the latest scholarship or, courtesy of the areas for future research suggested in the conclusions of many of the chapters, to identify their own dissertation projects (UG, PG and Ph.D. levels respectively).   

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introducing and Advancing Critical Marketing Studies (Mark Tadajewski, Matthew Higgins, Janice Denegri-Knott and Rohit Varman).

Chapter Two: Postmodernism and Critical Marketing (Nikhilesh Dholakia and Fuat Fırat).

Chapter Three: Postcolonialism, Subalternity, and Critical Marketing (Rohit Varman).

Chapter Four: Feminist Perspectives in Marketing: Past, Present and Future (Pauline Maclaran and Olga Kravets).

Chapter Five: Critical Social Marketing: Reflections, Introspections and Future (Ross Gordon).

Chapter Six: Critical Macromarketing, Sustainable Marketing and Globalization (Bill Kilbourne).

Chapter Seven: Critical Perspectives on Place Marketing (Massimo Giovanardi, Mihalis Kavaratzis and Maria Lichrou).

Chapter Eight: Critical Arts Marketing (Gretchen Larsen and Finola Kerrigan).

Book Section Break: Critical Marketing – Marketing Practices in Focus

Chapter Nine: Critical Studies of Marketing Work (Peter Svensson).

Chapter Ten: The Cultural Turn in Lifestyle Research: Overview and Reflections (Gokcen Coskuner-Balli).

Chapter Eleven: Advertising Practice and Critical Marketing (Chris Hackley).

Chapter Twelve: Critical Reflections on the Marketing Concept and Consumer Sovereignty (Mark Tadajewski).

Chapter Thirteen: Service-Dominant Logic: The Evolution of a Universal Marketing Rhetoric (Chris Miles).

Chapter Fourteen: Metaphor and Relationship Marketing Discourse (Lisa O’Malley).

Chapter Fifteen: Critical Perspectives on Ethical Consumption (Michal Carrington and Andreas Chatzidakis).

Chapter Sixteen: Religious Critiques of the Market (Aliakbar Jafari).

Book Section Break: Rethinking Consumers and Markets – Critiques of Markets

Chapter Seventeen: Re-mapping Power for Critical Marketing and Consumer Research (Janice Denegri-Knott).

Chapter Eighteen: Ideology and Critical Marketing Studies (Giana M. Eckhardt, Rohit Varman and Nikhilesh Dholakia).

Chapter Nineteen: Non-Western Cultures and Critical Marketing (Özlem Sandıkcı Türkdoğan).

Chapter Twenty: Choice and Choicelessness in Consumer Practice (Ruby Roy Dholakia, A. Fuat Fırat and Nikhilesh Dholakia).

Chapter Twenty-One: Managing Racial Stigma in Consumer Culture (David Crockett).

Chapter Twenty-Two: Consumer Vulnerability: Critical Insights from Stories, Action Research and Visual Culture (Susan Dunnett, Kathy Hamilton, and Maria Piacentini).

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Embodied Consumer (Maurice Patterson).

Book Section Break: Critical Marketing – Marketing Practices in Focus

Chapter Twenty-Four: Critical Perspectives on Brand Management (Adam Arvidsson and Alex Giordano).

Chapter Twenty-Five: Gender, Marketing, and Emotions: A Critical, Feminist Exploration of the Ideological Helix that Defines Our Working Worlds (Lorna Stevens).

Chapter Twenty-Six: Biopolitical Marketing and the Commodification of Social Contexts (Detlev Zwick and Alan Bradshaw).

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Exploitation and Emancipation (Bernard Cova and Bernard Paranque).

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Political Economy Approaches to Transnational Commodity Markets: An Application to the Case of the Global Palm Oil Market (Martin Fougère).

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Social Media, Big Data and Critical Marketing (Christian Fuchs).

Chapter Thirty: Marketing and the Production of Consumers’ Objective Violence (Eduardo André Teixeira Ayrosa and Renata Couto de Azevedo de Oliveira).